Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled by the Liberal Party again. It has been going on all day.
The Liberals used to stand by these kinds of principles. Their Citizenship Act, in 1947, made it possible to strip citizenship from those who committed treason, even if it made them stateless.
That was the Liberal Party when it stood up for Canadian citizenship, when it had been hardened by war, when it had solid people in its front bench, and when it was fiscally responsible. Today the Liberals joke about it, but let us be honest: Louis St. Laurent was quite fiscally responsible. It was a long time ago, before any of them were born.
The fact of the matter is that all of this went by the boards in 1977 when the Trudeau model came forward. Dual citizenship was allowed in Canada, and rightly so. We respect that. However, there was next to no penalty and next to no interest in whether people were loyal in these deep ways to Canada, to her institutions, and to her laws, and there were almost no consequences.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a time when the Liberal Party was somewhere between the superpowers in the Cold War, playing footsie with Moscow and not standing on the kinds of principles that Canadians like to stand on and have stood on for centuries.
This measure is reasonable. We would not create stateless people with this measure. It would not apply to those who have only Canadian citizenship, and anyone who wants it to not apply them can renounce their other citizenship.
If a dual national commits these crimes, they would be far fewer in number than the number of citizenships revoked for fraudulent intention.
This would be the right thing to do. It would send a powerful message. It would be a powerful deterrent telling those inside the country and outside that we are serious not only about the privileges and benefits of citizenship but also about the responsibilities, the accountability, and the example that we expect to be set by those who carry the passport, by those who vote in this country, and by those who are proud to call themselves Canadian citizens, as we have done for 100 years.